I heard about the Grotto from a dead girl. Or, I should say, she was dead by the time I made my way into the saint-haunted depths.
Her name was Cara Lee. A friend of a friend, she knew about my love of religious kitsch – especially decaying subterannean kitsch – and told me, “You’ve got to see this place to believe it.” I didn’t know Cara Lee well. I only spoke with her a half dozen times.
She’d given me, before the cancer killed her, actual directions to the Grotto of the Agony. “Niver Town Line Road to Marrowback. Left on Bishop and then onto Mission Road. Go about a quarter mile. There’s no way you can miss it.” She was right. The dead usually are.
She’d been to the Mission and its grotto only once, gone down deep inside and seen the rotting saints and dissolving angels. She’d stood before the headless apostle leading a donkey into darkness.
A former seminary, built on the land that had been the estate of Bishop Bernard McQuaid, the Mission had once been a proud and stately bastion of Catholicism, in the middle of beautiful nowhere. Far out in the rural countryside, on a wooded hillside, the Mission was now mostly empty, and sliding into decrepitude. Four stories tall, made of bland, blond brick, it stretches out like an abandoned county hospital. Hundreds of windows look out to the ridgeline on the far side of Hemlock Lake. Now many of the windows are broken, and none of them show a human face. On the other side of Mission Road, acres of vineyard slope downward to the lake shore.
Following Cara Lee’s directions, I found the grotto, in a tangled ravine next to the Mission. The first time I went there, it looked like a stone fortress strangling in wild grape vines. The entrance was barely visible from the road. A crumbling stone pathway led downwards. Overgrown ornamental bushes sighed and plucked at my sleeves.
“De profundis,” I murmured, just before my descent, peering into the darkness below. My Latin was thin and shoddy. De profundis. From the depths. Or is it “Ad profundis?” Into the depths.
Snarls of ivy – poison, English, and otherwise – clung to the weeping stone walls. Masses of staghorn sumac clustered, their purplish mauve fuzz-fruit thick on the branches like velvet ornaments on a Victorian bric-a-brac tree. Groundwater seeped from the sides of the rill, feeding a feeble creek at the bottom. The air steamed. My shoes were already clotted with burrs and shiny black mud as I scrambled down the enbankment.
A sign above the entrance tells me I’ve found The Grotto of the Agony, the letters stencil-pressed into concrete. But why here, in lost, rural, hill-country? Why a subterranean gothic god-cave between Conesus and Hemlock, the two farthest-west of the eleven Finger Lakes?
Like most Roman Catholic grottos, this one is man-made, an artificial cave. Fieldstone walls and roof, the upper surfaces sealed with a scabby membrane of tar. I found out later that this was the work of Brother Fridolin, a Bavarian monk who’d come to western New York State to teach the seminarians.
Again: bad Latin triggers itself in my mind: translated through worse Italian. Grotto, a cave, a vault, a crypt. Grotesque: of a grotto, distorted, convoluted, secret, hidden, underground. Certainly what I find inside is grotesque by any definition, old or new.
The grotto calls my name. The opening itself is a gaping toothless stone mouth, breathing damp air – in, out, in. Saints are supposed to die “in the odor of sanctity.” That, I’m sure, is not what I smell as I take a deep breath, duck my head and make my entrance.
Time and weather have turned these holy men into monsters, and Jesus into a leper messiah. And now the plaster saints sing with their mouths dissolving into sagging holes. The Virgin herself, praying and ecstatic, is exalted, though decades of rain water and ice-crowns have rotted the side of her head like a pumpkin left abandoned in November. The baby Jesus has pock marks and pustules.
The grotto presents a parade of decay, but also transformation. The walls are swirled green with fungus. Stones are turning porous like the broken ends of ancient bones. Cement becomes sand, a dirt floor where broken plaster body parts lay.
There’s graffiti on the walls and a few beer cans set up in empty niches as though for target practice. I don’t know whether local kids have been using the grotto for a shooting gallery, but some of the saints definitely look like they’d been through a battle.
Angels, mostly whole, point toward heaven, or to the huge Mission building on the hillside nearby. Naive plaster palm trees, like illustrations from a Sunday School lesson, flank the nativity crèche scene. A bearded Moses with his arms outstretched, a camel, and in bas relief, a floating prince kissing an old man on the forehead.
I have no real sense of how the grotto had been originally laid out. It’s not based on the stations the cross. It’s not a gospel narrative or a shrine to a specific saint. Maybe the less aggressive vandals had just moved the statues around as though they were life-sized chess pieces in a game whose rules nobody understood.
I go deeper, seeing a crucifixion scene with three figures praying beneath, an “Ave Maria” tableau, and three bearded sleepers, the disciples in the garden of Gethsemane, snoozing while Jesus prepares for death.
At the end of the grotto, in the final chamber, is a Mother of Sorrows tableau. A plaster imitation of Michelangelo’s “Pieta” stands in the shadows.
I’d seen the real “Pieta,” dragged there by my father at the New York World’s Fair in Queens when I was ten years old. Though he was a devout Roman Catholic, the blue-lit sacred gloom of the viewing chamber was the only holy presence I ever entered with him. And the only reason we stood in line to see this beautiful dying Jesus was its World’s Fair glamor, not its religious significance.
I remembered almost nothing else about the fair. But the “Pieta,” with the face not yet assaulted by the lunatic with a hammer, made an impression on me. Dead white Jesus in his mother’s arms. So much weight, so much grief, such brilliantly colorless stone.
The “Pieta” on Mission Road in Conesus, isn’t quite so impressive. I think about the insane man who’d attacked the original in Italy, breaking off Jesus’ nose. I think about the local kids who come here with cans of spray paint and Genny Cream Ale.
The light in the World’s Fair Vatican Pavilion had been an unearthly virginal blue. In the Grotto of the Agony a fungoid greenish light streams down through a hole in the ceiling, making a long slash across the dirt floor.
Disoriented, slightly woozy, I feel as though I’ve invaded someone’s private nightmare. It’s all Roman Catholic iconography, none of it unfamiliar. But the decay, the neglect, the active destruction by the boozed-up yokel teenagers, makes the agony of the grotto far worse. A tomb, a secret cave, a wound in the side of the hill.
Finally, I flee into the sunshine, feeling dazed, slightly sickened, as though I’d just escaped from a damp and dingy hallucination.
Made brave by my success perhaps, or muzzy-headed from the smell and sight of spiritual decay, I climb the embankment and go to the side door of the Mission and knock.
There are a few cars out back, parked by the service building. Someone has been cutting the endless lawns and trimming the trees that have grown up like green sentries on both sides of the chapel. A clothes line sways with sheets and pillow cases.
I peer through the screen door at the side of the main Mission building. The inner door is open. I call out “hello” in a tentative voice. No answer. I try again, rapping gently on the aluminum jamb. “Hello?”
Footsteps from within and then a small piping voice. “You want to come in?”
I open the door and there’s a girl of perhaps eight years old. She wears a long blue jumper, a kerchief over her hair and an open, accepting expression on her face. “You want to see my skating rink?” she asks, as though this is the most natural of questions.
“Sure.”
I’ve come this far; how can I refuse? So she takes me up four flights of stairs to the top floor of the Mission. It’s empty, a huge space lit on the east and west sides by dozens of dormer windows. The floor is linoleum and columns are spaced the whole way, holding up the roof. After being in the dankness and shadow of the grotto, rising to this upper realm is just as heady an experience. Light streams in, and the little girl puts on her roller skates and begins zooming round and round.
She doesn’t say anything else to me. Not one word. Just the endless loops and figure eights, around the columns, and back again. Her dress flows behind her, a blue vapor trail, as she flies from one end of the hall to the other, a smiling high-speed angel.
Of course, I’m asking myself why we are here, strangers, linked by the metallic rumble of roller skates and the delight she obviously feels in her graceful back-and-forthing.
“Lemniscate” – the word rises from the depths of memory. The lemniscate is the figure eight lying on its side, the mathematical sign of infinity. She’s making the sign of infinity up there in the great loft where a hundred beds had once been arranged barracks-style for young men studying to join the priesthood.
I don’t even say good-bye. Now the little girl has no thought for me except as an audience who might admire her graceful skating prowess. The steady rumble follows me down.
On the ground floor I peek into a few rooms. Silence, dust, empty book shelves, stacks of chairs, long corridors and a kitchen that had been abandoned years before. I’d heard that some kind of splinter sect had bought the Mission, but other than the girl, saw no one else that day.
I peek into one room and see beautiful crosses and pictures of faded saints. I recognize St. Florian (a holy Roman solider and now patron saint of firemen) pouring a bucket of water out of heaven onto a burning building. In the next room there’s a pile of novena tracts and a box of hand-sized New Testaments. And not another human being.
I leave the Mission and look up at the fourth floor dormers. I can still hear the girl skating. She continues to make her rolling lemniscate, the sign of the infinite. Going back to my car, I skirt the grotto, getting a whiff of the rank greenery and rotting statues deep inside.
The next time I make my way down to the Mission, the Grotto is gone. A couple of years have passed and another cult-like family, reputed to have shadowy connections to North Korean spies, has taken possession. They’d gotten tired of trespassers, vandals, and teen-aged partiers. There must have been liability issues too, as gravity and hard weather slowly dragged the Grotto into the earth. Lush weeds flourished where once plaster saints and angels had stood in mute devotion. It must have been a big job, even with heavy equipment, to take out the statues, tear down the masonry walls and domes, and remove the rubble. Signs now warned everyone – “This Means You” – to stay away.
I sit a while in my car on the roadside, with the window down, listening. No far-off rumble of steel wheels on linoleum. No top story lemniscate. And no reason to try my luck again, knocking on the door. Like the Grotto, the little girl with the roller skates is long gone.